The Shady Bowl made it into the North Attleboro paper!!

Friends top off the season with a game

Jarod Lemieux, top, and A.J. Magnuson land in the snow during the Shady Bowl at the Ruth Rhind Recreation Area in North Attleboro.

NORTH ATTLEBORO — Doug Clinton grew up in Attleboro and flies up from South Carolina to see his family for the holidays – and to participate in what he called “the big event” of the season.

He was talking about the Shady Bowl, a flag football game played on the field at Shady Pines at the Ruth Rhind Recreation Area off Hunts Bridge Road.

Starting in 2001, a group of childhood friends has come back to the same field they played on as kids for one more game when everyone is home for the holidays. The games started out with four players on each team the first year, but they have steadily grown since.

The group grew up in the area, many of them graduates of North Attleboro High School, Bishop Feehan High School or Tri- County Regional Vocational-Technical High School in Franklin, Justin Allen said.

“The core group is all from the same neighborhood,” Joe Lurie, of North Attleboro, said.

Tight coverage: Marc Valois gets off a throw before Justin Deveau can get to him during the Shady Bowl.

Despite being played every holiday season, this year was the first time competitors had to deal with snow.

“It’s the first snow bowl,” Allen said.

“This was something that all the neighborhood kids got the idea to do,” Allen said.

While the game is played among friends, the players still get very competitive.

“There’s a lot of pride at stake,” Allen said. “Trash talking is a must.”

“This is grade school recess stuff, just now, we’re 30 years old,” he added.

Each team had nine players on Saturday, including five sets of siblings – several of whom grew up in the same neighborhood.

“Most of these guys I went to elementary school with,” Lurie said.

“We’re been friends for 30 years, how rare is that?” Allen said.

This year was special, Allen said, because his brother Jon had just gotten home from Iraq a few weeks earlier. “I’ve known these guys forever,” Jon Allen said. “I actually went to elementary school with seven of them.”

The annual event also gives the friends a chance to reconnect with those who have moved away to other states.

“It’s a good chance to catch up and stuff,” Lurie said.

This year’s game was also the first time organizers used a Facebook event to let everyone know when it would be played.

“People have been excited about this for a month,” Justin Allen said. “It’s a testament to growing up in North Attleboro.”

- by Allison Collins

Jarod Lemieux, top, and A.J. Magnuson land in the snow during the Shady Bowl at the Ruth Rhind Recreation Area in North Attleboro.

Let me preface this whole story by first saying that I hate going to the doctor’s office for any reason. I also still go to see my doctor in North Attleboro because the doctors around this area just aren’t as good. Yesterday morning I had a fasting blood work scheduled for 9:30 am. This means that I had to stop eating at 9:00 pm the night before, wake up in the morning, and drive an hour to the lab to get some blood taken. Lately I’ve been eating even more than normal, usually at least every 3 hours or so, so going 12 hours with no food was hard enough to begin with.

I get to the doctor’s office and I’m feeling alright. I’m a little hungry, but nothing major, I’ll live. Let me also say right here that there are two more things I hate about this situation. 1) I don’t like needles…at all. My mind goes into over-analysis with it, and when I think about a needle going in I think about all the cells in my skin being pierced and destroyed along the way. I know, it’s nuts. 2) I don’t care for the sight of blood either. I can deal with it in emergency situations because another part of me takes over, but just random blood is no good. Given these two conditions, I never look at the needle when they stick me with it and I don’t watch the blood coming out. So I sit down in the chair and put my arm out. The “nurse” informs me, “I’m a student, are you OK with me drawing the blood?” There’s a little extra anxiety thrown on me in this statement, until I remember that last time I had blood drawn it was a student too, and there were no problems whatsoever, so I respond, “Not a problem.”

I turned my head away from my arm and started looking at the various photos on the wall of who I assume are children of the employees there. Distracting myself seems to make things easier. I feel the needle pierce, little bit of pain, nothing I haven’t dealt with before. It’s in there for a sec and I turn my head as it’s being pulled out and the gauze pad being put on. A moment of discomfort, but I’m done…except I’m not. The student proceeds to tell the nurse nearby, “I didn’t go far enough in. I didn’t get any blood out.” Ohhhhhhh great. The nurse comes over now and lets me know they’ll need to take blood from my other arm instead. She says, “You can unclench that fist now.” As I do I notice the ends of my fingertips have gone nearly purple. As I look up at the nurse preparing the other needle, I put out my left arm and get hit by a sudden light-headedness…

The next thing I know I hear my name over and over and an alarm sounding. I’m in a bit of a haze and I’m trying to respond, but I’m having trouble seeing, moving, or talking. Slowly reality starts to come back into focus and I notice I’m now lying on the floor with my legs being held up. There are two doctors and several nurses hovering around above me. At this point I’m a bit dizzy and feeling very nauseated. They keep me on the floor for a moment and ask me if I know where I am and who they are. “Yes,” I respond. They get a wheelchair set up, give me some apple juice to drink, and wheel me upstairs to the offices. When we get upstairs, they helped me onto the doctor’s table where I laid down to try to regain myself. There’s no way I’m driving an hour home in this condition, so the nurse asks me who to call. As I was responding and giving them my Mom’s phone number, the nausea increased and I could tell I was going to throw up. The nurse quickly grabbed a basin for me and all the apple juice I’d just had came right back out. I laid there for another 30-40 minutes until my mother arrived. At this point the dizziness has gone away and I’m feeling pretty much back to normal except for a little stomach uncomfortableness. They put me back in the wheelchair, bring me outside to the car, and load me in.

Apparently, since I was a kid, I’d get sick if I didn’t have breakfast, but this was the worst I’d ever gotten. My Mom figures I should get some food in me, but at this point I don’t really feel like eating anything, especially with being in a moving car. We head over to Panera where my Mom gets me some toast and we parked in a lot where I could eat it undisturbed. I probably got about two bites of toast in when the feeling hit me again. I opened the door and threw up in the parking lot. Great. That always makes me feel good. At this point we figure it’s best just to get home and get some rest before trying to eat anything more. I get home, plop down on the couch, and fall asleep for a good hour or so.

I woke up to a phone call from my Mom asking how I was feeling and if I’d eaten anything yet. At this point I notice it’s about 2pm, and I have my last class for the semester at 4pm in Fall River, in which I have to give a presentation with my group. I didn’t want to go, but I had to be there. I started eating crackers because I figured they go down the easiest and quickly finished a whole sleeve. I then had a bagel and that went down fine too. My stomach was feeling pretty much back to normal, but having eaten so little over the course of the day I was feeling extremely weak. Even so, my Mom picked me up and brought me to class because my car was still sitting in the lot at the doctor’s office in North Attleboro. Fortunately, my friend Gilian offered to give me a ride home since we weren’t sure what time class would end. When I got home (around 7pm now) I was pretty much back to normal, so I got in my Mom’s car and we drove to North Attleboro, I hopped in my car, stopped at Panera to get some real food in me, and drove back home to relax. What a friggin day. Can’t wait to reschedule my appointment and go again!!

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From NCW Reunion ’09 – Seekonk YMCA – May 1st, 2009